Research on indefinite causal structures is a rapidly evolving field that has a potential not only to make a radical revision of the classical understanding of space-time but also to achieve enhanced functionalities of quantum information processing. For example, it is known that indefinite causal structures provide exponential advantage in communication complexity when compared to causal protocols. In quantum computation, such structures can decide whether two unitary gates commute or anticommute with a single call to each gate, which is impossible with conventional (causal) quantum algorithms. A generalization of this effect to $n$ unitary gates, originally introduced in M. Araújo et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 250402 (2014) and often called Fourier promise problem (FPP), can be solved with the quantum-$n$-switch and a single call to each gate, while the best known causal algorithm so far calls $O(n^2)$ gates. In this work, we show that this advantage is smaller than expected. In fact, we present a causal algorithm that solves the only known specific FPP with $O(n \log(n))$ queries and a causal algorithm that solves every FPP with $O(n\sqrt{n})$ queries. Besides the interest in such algorithms on their own, our results limit the expected advantage of indefinite causal structures for these problems.
It is usually assumed that a quantum computation is performed by applying gates in a specific order. One can relax this assumption by allowing a control quantum system to switch the order in which the gates are applied. This provides a more general kind of quantum computing, that allows transformations on blackbox quantum gates that are impossible in a circuit with fixed order. Here we show that this model of quantum computing is physically realizable, by proposing an interferometric setup that can implement such a quantum control of the order between the gates. We show that this new resource …
In an ordinary quantum algorithm the gates are applied in a fixed order on the systems. The introduction of indefinite causal structures allows to relax this constraint and control the order of the gates with an additional quantum state. It is known that this quantum-controlled ordering of gates can reduce the query complexity in deciding a property of black-box unitaries with respect to the best algorithm in which the gates are applied in a fixed order. However, all tasks explicitly found so far require unitaries that either act on unbounded dimensional quantum systems in the asymptotic limit…
We combine a quantum dynamical propagator that explicitly accounts for quantum mechanical time ordering with optimal control theory. After analyzing its performance with a simple model, we apply it to a superconducting circuit under so-called Pythagorean control. Breakdown of the rotating-wave approximation is the main source of the very strong time-dependence in this example. While the propagator that accounts for the time ordering in an iterative fashion proves its numerical efficiency for the dynamics of the superconducting circuit, its performance when combined with optimal control turns o…
We analyze a discrimination problem of a single-qubit unitary gate with two candidates, where the candidates are not provided with their classical description, but their quantum sample is. More precisely, there are three unitary quantum gates -- one target and one sample for each of the two candidates -- whose classical description is unknown except for their dimension. The target gate is chosen equally among the candidates. We obtain the optimal protocol that maximizes the expected success probability, assuming the Haar distribution for the candidates. This problem is originally introduced in…
While the circuit model of quantum computation defines its logical depth or "computational time" in terms of temporal gate sequences, the measurement-based model could allow totally different temporal ordering and parallelization of logical gates. By developing techniques to analyze Pauli measurements on multi-qubit hypergraph states generated by the Controlled-Controlled-Z (CCZ) gates, we introduce a deterministic scheme of universal measurement-based computation. In contrast to the cluster-state scheme, where the Clifford gates are parallelizable, our scheme enjoys massive parallelization of…
Simulating the time evolution of a physical system at quantum mechanical levels of detail -- known as Hamiltonian Simulation (HS) -- is an important and interesting problem across physics and chemistry. For this task, algorithms that run on quantum computers are known to be exponentially faster than classical algorithms; in fact, this application motivated Feynman to propose the construction of quantum computers. Nonetheless, there are challenges in reaching this performance potential. Prior work has focused on compiling circuits (quantum programs) for HS with the goal of maximizing either acc…
Digital simulation of quantum dynamics by evaluating the time evolution of a Hamiltonian is the initially proposed application of quantum computing. The large number of quantum gates required for emulating the complete second quantization form of the Hamiltonian, however, makes such an approach unsuitable for near-term devices with limited gate fidelities that cause high physical errors. In addition, Trotter error caused by noncommuting terms can accumulate and harm the overall circuit fidelity, thus causing algorithmic errors. In this paper, we propose a new term ordering strategy, max-commut…
Symmetric and Antisymmetric Quantum States from Graph Structure and Orientation
Department of Physics, Federal University of Paran\'a, P.O. Box 19044, Curitiba 81531-980, Paran\'a, Brazil；Department of Mathematics, Federal University of Paran\'a, P.O. Box 19081, Curitiba 81531-980, Paran\'a, Brazil
The practical use of many types of near-term quantum computers requires accounting for their limited connectivity. One way of overcoming limited connectivity is to insert swaps in the circuit so that logical operations can be performed on physically adjacent qubits, which we refer to as solving the `routing via matchings' problem. We address the routing problem for families of quantum circuits defined by a hypergraph wherein each hyperedge corresponds to a potential gate. Our main result is that any unordered set of $k$-qubit gates on distinct $k$-qubit subsets of $n$ logical qubits can be ord…
We describe and analyze algorithms for classically simulating measurement of an $n$-qubit quantum state $ψ$ in the standard basis, that is, sampling a bit string $x$ from the probability distribution $|\langle x|ψ\rangle|^2$. Our algorithms reduce the sampling task to computing poly$(n)$ amplitudes of $n$-qubit states; unlike previously known techniques they do not require computation of marginal probabilities. First we consider the case where $|ψ\rangle=U|0^n\rangle$ is the output state of an $m$-gate quantum circuit $U$. We propose an exact sampling algorithm which involves computing $O(m)$ …
Implementing variational quantum algorithms with noisy intermediate-scale quantum machines of up to a hundred qubits is nowadays considered as one of the most promising routes towards achieving a quantum practical advantage. In multiqubit circuits, running advanced quantum algorithms is hampered by the noise inherent to quantum gates which distances us from the idea of universal quantum computing. Based on a one-dimensional quantum spin chain with competing symmetric and asymmetric pairwise exchange interactions, herein we discuss the capabilities of quantum algorithms with special attention p…
A hybrid classical-quantum approach for the solution of nonlinear ordinary differential equations using Walsh-Hadamard basis functions is proposed. Central to this hybrid approach is the computation of the Walsh-Hadamard transform of arbitrary vectors, which is enabled in our framework using quantum Hadamard gates along with state preparation, shifting, scaling, and measurement operations. It is estimated that the proposed hybrid classical-quantum approach for the Walsh-Hadamard transform of an input vector of size N results in a considerably lower computational complexity (O(N) operations) co…
